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How to Green the Marijuana Industry

by Derek7816zqph Posted on September 8, 2017

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From the outside looking in, the marijuana industry might appear very eco-friendly. After all, it involves harvesting plants — what could be greener than that? But there’s a darker environmental underbelly to many cannabis operations and, in a time where legalization is sweeping the nation, something has to be done.

Confronting the Problem

The problem with marijuana production is that most growing is done inside warehouses, greenhouses and other carefully monitored environments. As such, growers have very specific light and temperature requirements. Paul Isenbergh, who owns three cannabis-growing facilities in the hotbed market of Denver, Colo., told The Guardian he pays at least $4,000 per month for electricity. And when you consider that there are thousands of people just like Isenbergh, it’s not hard to believe a New Frontier study that says 1 percent of all U.S. energy is used to grow cannabis.

When it comes to outdoor growing, the situation isn’t much better. The pesticides used to protect the crops often pollute bodies of water and kill creatures.

“A bunch of fish may turn up dead in a creek, so we’ll go look, walk upstream and inevitably run into a marijuana growth site,” Patrick Foy from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife told the International Business Times.

3 Things Industry Leaders Can Do

Clearly there’s a problem. While making the public aware of the issue is one thing that can be done, it’s ultimately up to the leaders of the industry to take charge — and many of them are doing so.

Here are a few specific things that are being done, or can be done, to make the cannabis industry greener.

1. Improve Supply Chain Visibility

For cannabis dispensaries, marijuana growers, and manufacturing and sales operations, visibility is an absolute must. It’s impossible to run a profitable and sustainable business without having a clear understanding of what’s happening within the business. Thankfully, progress is being made here.

Agrisoft Seed to Sale software is one product leading the way. Developed specifically for the cannabis industry, Agrisoft makes cannabis compliance a breeze and ensures businesses can track inventory and remain 100 percent accountable to regulators and lawmakers.

2. Dial Back Energy Usage

Energy consumption is obviously a big deal. In order for growers and harvesters to do their part, they’ll have to discover what it looks like to dial back energy usage without compromising the quality of their product.

According to Amy Andrle, who runs the only cannabis retail store in Denver with official sustainability certification, there are some specific things cannabis-related businesses must do. She encourages the use of LED lighting and avoiding peak demand by staggering when lights are turned on and off. She also suggests hand-watering plants and limiting gray water productions.

3. Enhance Packaging

Did you know that 300 million tons of plastic are produced every year — and that half of it is intended for single use? This might seem like an unrelated problem, but the reality is that almost all cannabis products use plastic in packaging. (In a recent list of approved cannabis packaging types that the Oregon Liquor Control Commission put out, 28 out of 29 options included plastic.)

Believe it or not, the cannabis industry can have a very real impact on the reduction of single-use plastic packaging consumption. Many companies are already working hard to do their part, but it’s important that more join the fold.

Make Marijuana Green Again

As the decriminalization of marijuana continues to happen in more and more states around the nation, it’s important for marijuana growing, packaging and sales to become greener.

Sustainability is what will allow the industry to move forward.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock

Read More:
Study Finds Medical Pot Farms Draining Streams Dry
Hempcrete: A New Brick in the Wall
How Medicine Makes the Environment Sick

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Anna Johansson

Anna is a freelance writer, researcher and business consultant. A columnist for Entrepreneur.com, HuffingtonPost.com and more, Anna loves enjoying the great outdoors with her family. Follow her on

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How to Green the Marijuana Industry – September 8, 2017
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How America Treats Working Moms Like Shit

by AmandaFabinyi1 Posted on May 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Mothers have always worked in this country, whether out of desire or necessity. But America’s relationship with these employed moms has been fraught from the start. In 1873, a Harvard medical professor claimed that higher education would make young women infertile. During the 1950s, writers, psychiatrists, and psychologists argued that career women had “penis envy,” while John Bowlby’s “attachment theory” was widely misconstrued to mean that moms spending time apart from their kids would cause permanent psychological damage.

Where the emotional appeals haven’t worked, opponents have outright or effectively blocked moms from clocking in by cutting day care programs, firing them for breastfeeding, and refusing them family leave. To this day, the United States remains the only industrialized nation that doesn’t mandate maternity leave.

As many have pointed out, all moms are working moms, regardless of whether they are paid for their work. But as sociologist Arlie Hochschild put it in her book The Second Shift, mothers juggling housework with a day job enjoy a “double burden.” In time for Mother’s Day, here’s a short history of some of America’s most underappreciated employees.

1800s
Women are legally barred from jobs such as lawyering and working underground based on the notion of “separate spheres“—a women’s should be at home with her children.
1850
The popular magazine Godey’s Lady Book touts piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity as the traits of “true womanhood,” and notes that women “step out of their own path when they attempt to encroach on the proper masculine pursuits.”
1851
Abolitionist Sojourner Truth points out that Godey’s definition excludes black women, who are often obliged to work outside the home to feed their children. “Ain’t I a woman?” she asks.
1869
A shorthanded Treasury Department hires married women including moms to fill positions vacated by Union soldiers. At war’s end, some widows are allowed to keep their jobs—at half the pay men get.
1873
Harvard Medical School professor Edward Clarke argues that higher education makes women infertile.
Turn of the 20th Century postcard

1888
Josephine Jewell Dodge establishes an early nursery school in a New York City slum that is later featured at Chicago’s World Fair. She goes on to start the country’s first national day care organization. Her critics propose an alternative strategy—”mothers’ pensions“—to keep women at home.
1930s
The Depression forces white middle-class moms to look for jobs—the number of married women in the workforce jumps 50 percent—while women of color solicit day labor in so-called slave markets. But “no one should get the idea that Uncle Sam is going to rock the baby to sleep,” the White House declares.
1943
World War II shortages of male workers inspire the first federally funded day care program. But the armistice marks a return to traditional gender attitudes: The day care initiative lapses and career-driven women are described by popular writers as “lost,” “man-hating” or “suffering from penis envy.”

1950s
Employers phase out the “marriage bar“—the legal practice of firing (or not hiring) women who get married. It will be nearly three decades before federal law forbids the boss from firing women for being pregnant.
1951
Psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s “attachment theory” posits that separating a mother from her child causes long-term behavioral difficulties—short separations are fine, he says, but his theory is twisted to make the case that mothers shouldn’t work.
1952
Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy is written into an episode of the sitcom I Love Lucy, but the actors are not allowed to use the word “pregnant” on air—too vulgar, says CBS.

1963
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique gives voice to “the problem that has no name”—the frustrations and disappointments of housewives. Friedan had conceived of her idea as a magazine piece, but no magazine would take it.
Betty Friedan AP Photo/Anthony Camerano

1969
Under disability laws, five states allow female workers paid maternity leave, while others specifically exclude pregnancy as a temporary disability. A federal family-leave law remains decades away.
1970
“I have no objection of a pediatric or psychiatric nature about women going to work,” writes child-development guru Dr. Benjamin Spock: “What I say is that the children are going to have to be reared, and you ought to have women growing up feeling this is important, womanly work.”
Dr. Spock Associated Press

1971
Congress votes to establish federally funded child care centers nationwide, but President Richard Nixon vetoes the bill, saying it works against “the family-centered approach.”
1972
The Equal Rights Amendment, which outlaws sex discrimination, is attacked by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly on the grounds that a women’s place is in the home. (The bill flops.) Betty Freidan dubs Schlafly “Aunt Tom.”
1978
An ad for Enjoli perfume croons, “I can put the wash on the line. Feed the kids. Get dressed. Pass out the kisses and get to work by five of nine. ‘Cuz I’m a wooooman!” Congress passes the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, making it illegal to fire a woman for being pregnant—employers must offer her medical benefits equivalent to what other workers get.

1979
Working Mother magazine targets America’s 16 million working moms: “We would like to share in your problems, your concerns for your family—and in your pride.” (It’s still around.)
Working Mother magazine

1989
In The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes the “double burden” of mothers juggling housework with a day job. Also Child magazine coins the phrase “mommy wars” to describe tensions between working and stay-at-home mothers.
1992
Vice President Dan Quayle attacks TV show Murphy Brown for “mocking the importance of fathers” after the eponymous character, a working journalist, decides to raise her baby alone.

1992
Asked by reporters about allegations that her husband directed business to her law firm while governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton responds, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” Homemakers are furious.
John Sykes/Liason

1993
The Family Medical Leave Act guarantees maternity leave—but it’s unpaid, and more than half of working women are excluded thanks to exceptions for small businesses and part-timers
1994
Asked how he feels about then-wife Marla Maples (top) working, Donald Trump tells ABC, “I have days where I think it’s great. And then I have days where, if I come home—and I don’t want to sound too much like a chauvinist—but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof.”
1996
Amid backlash against mythical “welfare queens,” President Bill Clinton overhauls the system, forcing single mothers to get a job within two years or lose their federal benefits.
1997
Future Indiana Gov. Mike Pence argues in an op-ed that “day care kids get the short end of the emotional stick” and that children with two working parents suffer “stunted emotional growth.” Also the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, a bill to end discrimination against nursing moms and make companies give women a place they can pump breast milk, dies in committee.
1999

The proportion of moms staying at home rather than working hits a low point of 23 percent. (By 2012, it’s up to 29 percent.)

2003
The New York Times Magazine describes the “opt-out revolution”—highly educated women scaling back their careers to stay home with their kids.
2008
The VP nomination of Sarah Palin, a mother of five, renews debate over work-life balance. “You can juggle a BlackBerry and a breast pump in a lot of jobs, but not in the vice presidency,” one Obama supporter tells the New York Times.
2009
Modern Family premieres on ABC—none of its fictional moms have jobs. Also a Texas woman is fired for asking her boss to let her pump breast milk at work. A (male) federal judge rules the firing is permissible because “lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition” protected by law.

2010
The Affordable Care Act mandates work breaks and a private space for new moms to pump breast milk.
April 2012
Mitt Romney defends his homemaker wife: “I happen to believe that all moms are working moms.” Yet earlier, talking about the welfare-work requirements Massachusetts enacted while he was governor, Romney said that even moms with two-year-olds “need to go to work…I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'”
July 2012
Anne Marie Slaughter argues in The Atlantic that women cannot, in fact, “have it all”—kids and a fulfilling career. The problem, she writes, isn’t an “ambition gap,” but rather that America’s workplace culture still doesn’t value families.
Sept. 2012
“At the end of the day,” Michelle Obama tells the Democratic National Convention crowd, “My most important title is still ‘mom-in-chief.'”

2013
In her best-selling book, Facebook bigwig Sheryl Sandberg exhorts women to “lean in” at work. Cultural critic bell hooks eviscerates the book as “faux feminism…brought to us by a corporate executive who does not recognize the needs of pregnant women until it’s happening to her.”
2014
Apple and Facebook offer to freeze employees’ eggs in what critics call a cynical bid to delay childbearing. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, meanwhile, claims she has it harder than office moms who “can come home in the evening.” Retorts a New York Post columnist, “Thank God I don’t make millions filming one movie per year.”
2016
America remains the only industrialized nation that doesn’t mandate paid maternity leave—only 14 percent of working moms can get it through their employers. In a September interview, Ivanka Trump brags to Cosmopolitan about her dad’s maternity-leave plan, calling him “a great advocate for women in the workforce.” But it turns out many Trump Hotels, including Mar-a-Lago, don’t offer paid maternity leave.
Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

2017
President Trump proposes a child care plan and asks Congress to “help ensure new parents have paid family leave.” But a Tax Policy Center analysis concludes that 70 percent of the plan’s benefits would go to families making $100,000 or more. “The devil,” the ACLU notes, “is in the details“—the plan applies only to married birth mothers, making it “as inadequate as it is discriminatory.”

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How America Treats Working Moms Like Shit

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The High Cost of Health Care Is Stealing Years of Life From Poor Americans

by Hildega86H Posted on April 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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According to a new series of studies in The Lancet, the United States risks a “21st century health-poverty trap” if it does not address low-income Americans’ growing inability to access or afford quality health care. The five papers published today in the British medical journal describe how the high cost of health care is intensifying the widening gap between the rich and poor and issue a call for a single-payer health care system.

The studies highlight several alarming trends: America’s richest 1 percent live more than a decade longer on average than the poorest Americans; 40 percent of poor Americans skip going to the doctor because they can’t afford to; the neediest 20 percent of Americans spend almost twice what the richest 20 percent Americans spend on private health insurance; and 1 out of every 10 households facing high medical costs declares bankruptcy, even after the implementation of Obamacare.

“We are witnessing a slow-moving disaster unfolding for the health of lower-income Americans who have spent their working lives in a period of rising income inequalities,” says Dr. Jacob Bor, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Some of the health effects of poverty documented in the studies are staggering. The average life expectancy rates of the poorest 5 percent Americans have not budged since 2001, despite gains by middle and high-income Americans, who can now expect to live an extra two years on average. Instead, entrenched poverty is elevating mortality rates: The wealthiest 1 percent now can expect to live 10 to 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent of Americans.

The Lancet series kicks off with an introduction by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders calling for a single-payer health care system. “Health care is not a commodity. It is a human right,” he writes. “The goal of a health-care system should be to keep people well, not to make stockholders rich. The USA has the most expensive, bureaucratic, wasteful, and ineffective health-care system in the world.”

The studies also conclude that America would benefit from a single-payer health care system. Authors Dr. Adam Gaffney of the Cambridge Health Alliance and Dr. Danny McCormick of Harvard Medical School argue that offering comprehensive health coverage to all Americans would close the current gaps in access to health care: “A single-payer, Medicare-for-all reform—championed by Senator Bernie Sanders during his upstart presidential campaign, as well as by many physicians and the nation’s largest nurses union—would, in our view, best address health-care inequalities.”

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The High Cost of Health Care Is Stealing Years of Life From Poor Americans

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In One Executive Order, Trump Revoked Years of Workplace Protections for Women

by JudeI09uqjphldl Posted on April 5, 2017

Mother Jones

In 2014, President Barack Obama signed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order. It required companies with federal contracts to heed 14 different labor and civil rights laws, including ones aimed at protecting parental leave, weeding out discrimination against women and minorities, and ensuring equal pay for women and fair processes surrounding workplace sexual harassment allegations.

Last week, Trump revoked this order, leaving workers at thousands of companies much more vulnerable to a host of abuses from their employers—and undoing protections meant to create more equitable workplaces for women.

“We have an executive order that essentially forces women to pay to keep companies in business that discriminate against them—with their own tax dollars,” Noreen Farrell, the director of Equal Rights Advocates, told NBC. “It’s an outrage.”

One provision of the now-revoked order required paycheck transparency by companies holding federal contracts, in which they had to provide all employees with detailed statements of their hours and compensation—a measure that’s particularly important for protecting workers against wage theft. A second provision that was jettisoned banned the use of forced arbitration clauses by federal contractors in handling sexual harassment or discrimination claims in their workplaces. These types of clauses—which require allegations to be settled privately outside of court in usually secret proceedings—are a way for companies to preemptively keep sexual harassment allegations out of the public eye.

Trump’s order also revokes the requirement that companies seeking federal contracts disclose three year’s worth of violations of the Equal Employment Opportunity executive order, first signed in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson and since amended to include protections surrounding gender. The order now states that companies with federal contracts “will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.”

Nor will companies bidding on federal contracts be required to reveal their last three year’s worth of violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires that many companies provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to new parents.

The day before President Trump signed this order, it was reported that his daughter Ivanka—who has regularly spoken about her father’s plans to improve protections for working moms, and who is currently pushing a child care tax credit as part of the administration’s upcoming tax reform initiative—would represent the United States at an upcoming women’s empowerment summit in Berlin. Here is her tweet:

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John Oliver Explains Why It’s Time to Update Federal Marijuana Laws

by EstelleGariepy Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Despite the fact that recreational marijuana has been legalized in eight states—with 44 states also allowing some form of medical marijuana use—federal law continues to classify weed as an illegal Schedule 1 drug. On Sunday, John Oliver took on the issue of clashing marijuana laws, explaining why the Trump administration is likely to make it even harder to fix such outdated laws.

“If you have marijuana right now, even if you are acting completely legally according to your state, you may still be in serious jeopardy,” Oliver said. “And that’s not your weed-induced paranoia talking.”

The Last Week Tonight host also pointed to attorney general Jeff Sessions’ history of opposing marijuana use to show why current legislative attempts to finally reclassify the drug may be doomed.

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John Oliver Explains Why It’s Time to Update Federal Marijuana Laws

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Trump’s Pick to Oversee Obamacare’s Destruction Faces a Senate Grilling

by TrevorJaeztrwfd Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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When Donald Trump’s nominee to oversee the country’s health care system appears before the Senate on Wednesday morning, he can expect to face a barrage of questions not only about Republican plans to replace Obamacare, but also about whether he broke the law by profiting off health stocks.

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, before he later visits the Senate Finance Committee, which will vote on his confirmation. An orthopedic surgeon who has made it his political mission to reduce regulation of the medical industry, Price has led Republican attacks on President Barack Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act. He’s one of the few members of Congress to lay out a detailed alternative, although his proposal has not been adopted by the president he hopes to work for. But Price’s ability to get confirmed in the Senate might depend less on policy than on a string of alleged ethical lapses that have come to light since his nomination was announced in November.

All of this portends a confrontational hearing and a less-than-warm reception from Senate Democrats. Here are the controversies that are most likely to emerge in the hearing.

Obamacare replacement

Republicans have stumbled toward a repeal of the Affordable Care Act since the new Congress convened at the beginning of the month. Both chambers have passed resolutions to preclude a Democratic filibuster of a repeal, but Republicans are still struggling to figure out what will take Obamacare’s place if they eradicate the law.

Price has introduced the same Affordable Care Act replacement bill in each session of Congress since the law was enacted in 2009. But Price’s plan would likely strip many poor people of insurance by ending the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid coverage to millions of low-income Americans. Price would also change the formula for determining who gets government subsidies for private insurance so that it doesn’t take income into account—meaning far more of the tax benefits would go to the wealthy than under the current system.

Is Price’s plan Trump’s plan? No one knows. Over the weekend, Trump said his plan to replace Obamacare would offer “insurance for everybody”—something Price’s plan does not seem to offer. CNN reported that Price has been excluded from the Trump team’s deliberations on health care reform so that he can avoid answering questions about those plans in his Senate hearing.

Still, Price will have to offer some sort of vision for how the Trump White House will address the health system—and just promising to repeal Obamacare won’t be enough. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released a report finding that number of people without insurance would increase by 18 million under the first year of a repeal, with that number expanding to 32 million by 2026. Premiums for individually purchased insurance would also double beyond current projections over the next decade.

Conflicts of interest

Price has been the subject of ethics concerns since Trump announced his nomination. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Price has made more than $300,000 in trades in health care stocks over the past four years, while he continued to introduce health care legislation. Democrats called foul, with one House member writing a letter to federal financial regulators requesting an investigation into whether Price’s trading broke the law. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has pushed the Office of Congressional Ethics to examine whether Price’s stock trades violated laws prohibiting members of Congress from profiting off non-public knowledge.

Over the weekend, CNN reported that Price had bought between $1,001 and $15,000 in stock in a medical device company right before he introduced a bill that would have directly helped the company. On Tuesday, Schumer said that stock purchase “could very well be a violation of the law.”

Reproductive rights

Price is a staunch opponent of abortion rights. He has voted several times for a federal 20-week abortion ban, which stands in contrast to Trump’s pledge to send the abortion debate “back to the states” when his Supreme Court picks try to overturn Roe v. Wade. But abortion isn’t the only area where Price has fought against reproductive rights. Mother Jones reported in December on the myriad ways Price has tried to restrict contraception, including defunding Planned Parenthood, gutting Obamacare’s mandate that employer-sponsored insurance plans cover contraception without a copay, and passing “personhood” bills that would make certain IUDs and the morning-after pill illegal.

Payments to doctors

In addition to expanding insurance coverage, the Affordable Care Act changed the way doctors and hospitals are compensated in order to slow the growth rate of health spending. Throughout his career, Price has complained that the government burdens doctors with too many regulations and attacked proposals that would pay doctors for results rather than for each test ordered or procedure performed. Although he can’t repeal Obamacare’s insurance expansion without congressional action, he can reverse many of the law’s medical payment reforms, since these policies are largely at the discretion of the secretary of health and human services. Even as the American Medical Association has lavished praise on Price’s nomination, a faction of doctors has rejected the AMA’s endorsement and called for more scrutiny into Price’s attacks on the Obamacare reforms.

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Republican Congresswoman Discovers Her Followers Love Obamacare

by SallySteele079 Posted on January 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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With Republicans convinced they need to repeal Obamacare ASAP but unsure of how they want to replace it, Rep. Marsha Blackburn issued a public plea for help on Tuesday. The Tennessee Republican—and member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team—asked the Twitter masses to take a poll on whether they like the law. Turns out Blackburn’s followers are pretty big fans of the Affordable Care Act, with 84 percent of the 7,968 votes opposing a repeal of Obamacare.

Online polls are hardly scientific. But the GOP’s hopes to make Obamacare magically disappear without having to offer a replacement took a serious hit on Tuesday, when the American Medical Association—the country’s largest organization of doctors—wrote a letter to congressional leaders demanding that any tweaks to the health care law ensure that the 20 million people who gained insurance under Obamacare don’t lose coverage. That request would be impossible to meet under the various proposals floated by Republican politicians so far.

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Republican Congresswoman Discovers Her Followers Love Obamacare

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Obama Just Signed a Bill of Rights for Sexual-Assault Survivors

by AngelSwanzedehs Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that guarantees specific rights for people who have been victimized by a sexual assault.

The measure focuses on collecting and preserving rape kits, the forensic evidence collected in a medical examination after a suspected sexual assault. Police enter the DNA collected from rape kits into state and national databases, sometimes identifying and solving other crimes in addition to the initial rape case. Rape kits—more than 100,000 of them, as of 2014—have often languished for years in police warehouses and crime labs, going untested due to a lack of funds and, some argue, contempt for victims. The new law is the first at the federal level to address these problems, protecting survivors’ access to the initial forensic medical examination and instituting measures to ensure evidence of rape is appropriately preserved and tested.

Survivors can no longer be charged fees or prevented from getting a rape kit examination, even if they have not yet decided to file a police report. Once the medical examination is completed, the kits must be preserved, at no cost to the survivor, until the applicable statute of limitations runs out. Survivors will now be able to request that authorities notify them before destroying their rape kits, and they have the right to request that the evidence be preserved. Once the kit is tested, they’ll also have the right to be notified of important results —including a DNA profile match and toxicology report.

Survivors must also be informed of these rights, regardless of whether they decide to pursue legal action against an assailant. The law also creates a task force to examine how well the new regulations work.

The act was spearheaded by Rise, a nonprofit led by Amanda Nguyen, who became an advocate after her rape almost three years ago when she learned that her rape kit would be destroyed by the state of Massachusetts within six months unless she filed repeated “extension requests.”

“The system essentially makes me live my life by date of rape,” Nguyen told the Guardian in February.

Nguyen then contacted Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who began working with her to craft the bill, eventually introducing it in February. “Beginning today, our nation’s laws stand firmly on the side of survivors of sexual assault,” Shaheen said in a statement Friday. “I hope that these basic rights will encourage more survivors to come forward and pursue justice.”

The act passed unanimously in the House last month and by voice vote in the Senate last week. Obama signed the bill on Friday, two weeks after the White House launched a new effort to combat sexual assault for the youngest survivors—those in K-12 schools.

This story has been updated.

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Obama Just Signed a Bill of Rights for Sexual-Assault Survivors

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What We’ve Suspected About Fitbits All Along Is True

by MarkoBurhop Posted on October 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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The makers of Fitbit, the wearable activity tracker, say the technology is “redefining fitness.” Lots of people have bought in: About 1 in 5 Americans own a wearable fitness tracker, like Jawbone, Garmin, or Fitbit. Big-name companies—BP, Bank of America, IBM, Target, Barclays—offer free or subsidized trackers to their employees in hopes of developing a healthy, active workforce. The wearable fitness tracker industry is expected to top $5 billion within three years.

And the need is clear: More than two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese.

The problem is, there is mounting evidence that when it comes to improving health, the trackers don’t work.

In a Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology study published Tuesday, researchers tracked 800 people over the course of a year—some with Fitbits worn around their waists, some without. On average, those wearing Fitbits recorded a modest 16 more minutes of active physical activity than those without Fitbits, and no difference from the control group in health outcomes like weight or blood pressure. After a year, just 10 percent were still wearing the Fitbits. That finding echoes previous research finding that half of all fitness tracker owners don’t use them.

The study also looked at the effect of incentives: For the first six months, some Fitbit wearers were offered cash or charity donations based on reaching a certain number of steps. Those with the charity option didn’t exercise any more than those without; those with the cash option exercised slightly more, but not enough to affect health. When the incentive ended, they went back to their old habits.

Eric Finkelstein, a Duke-NUS Medical School professor and the study’s co-author, says having a fitness tracker is like having a scale in the bathroom—it can be a helpful measurement tool, but it’s not a public health intervention in and of itself. “The notion you can give out a bunch of watches and suddenly people will get more active is just silly,” he says.

The conclusions follow a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finding that those who wore wearable fitness trackers lost less weight than those self-reporting their diet and exercise.

The key issue, the authors of both studies say, is that trackers primarily measure steps, when in fact, the number of steps doesn’t matter as much as the amount of aerobic activity that will get you breathing hard. “If you just get 10,000 steps but are just trudging along, I’m not sure how those steps will have much health benefit,” says Finkelstein. He suspects that the goal of 10,000 steps, the default goal on today’s Fitbits, were calculated based on the federal government’s recommended 150 minutes of exercise per week. “So people sort of ran with this 10,000 steps number and took it a bit out of context.”

What’s more, Fitbit users can develop a false sense of achievement, said John Jakicic, a health researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and lead author of the JAMA, to NPR. “People would say, ‘Oh, I exercised a lot today, now I can eat more.’ And they might eat more than they otherwise would have.”

One improvement, says Finkelstein, would be tracking steps of aerobic activity rather than total steps on the device itself. (Fitbit tracks aerobic activity online.) Another approach is using the trackers as a measurement tool to complement fitness programs. Studies have shown that coupling trackers with counseling or personal training helps participants lose weight.

“As the leader in connected health and fitness, we are confident in the positive results our millions of users have seen from using Fitbit products,” said a Fitbit spokesman over email. “Numerous published studies, along with internal Fitbit data, continue to demonstrate the health benefits of using a fitness tracker combined with a mobile app to support health and fitness goals.” Fitbit points to the two studies involving counseling and personal training studies mentioned above, as well as to two small short-term studies of people with serious mental or physical illnesses.

So does this mean you should hold off on buying that Fitbit? “People who like to track these things, give it a go—I would say start out with a low-cost one,” says Finkelstein. But “don’t be surprised if in six months, you’re not using it.”

Correction: The original version of this article misstated the brand of fitness tracker used in the Journal of the American Medical Association study.

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What We’ve Suspected About Fitbits All Along Is True

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But If You Don’t Learn Cursive, How Will You Read the Declaration of Independence in the Original?

by KatherineMagana Posted on September 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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If pen retailers and state legislators are to be believed, cursive handwriting is facing an existential threat. Since the advent of the Common Core standards—which emphasize keyboard skills over nicely shaped P’s and Q’s—it’s been common knowledge for years that teachers are abandoning cursive in droves, spending classroom time instead on new technology and typing.

But lately, fancy handwriting is having somewhat of a comeback. Louisiana’s governor signed a law in June requiring cursive instruction all the way through grade 12. Mississippi’s education department recently added script to its standards. And starting this school year, third graders in Alabama are required to write legibly in cursive under the newly passed Lexi’s Law. State Rep. Dickie Drake named the Alabama bill after his granddaughter, who told him when she was in first grade that she wanted to learn “real writing.”

The jury is still out on whether learning script, not just print, improves children’s cognition. (There’s little proof to date that it does.) Meanwhile, scientists are inching closer to handwriting’s true existential threat: a mind-reading machine that turns thoughts into written language via a “brain to text” interface. Here’s a primer on how the technology and culture of handwriting has evolved over time.

3200 B.C.

With stylus and clay tablets, ancient Mesopotamians create abstract symbols to represent syllables of their spoken language.

600s

Quill pens and parchment paper take hold in Europe. Drippy ink discourages pen lifting, hence cursive.

1440s

Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press forces scribes to pivot to teaching penmanship.

c. 1712

A popular copybook by George Bickham teaches farmers and merchants to write in a “round” hand. Gentlemen of the era employ an italic script, while accomplished women practice “ladies’ roman.” (In general, only fairly well-off white males are taught to write.)

1740

South Carolina’s Negro Act makes it a crime to teach slaves to write: “Suffering them to be employed in writing may be attended with great inconveniences.” Other colonies (and later, states) follow suit.

1776

John Hancock’s “John Hancock” appears prominently on the Declaration of Independence.

1848

Educator Platt Rogers Spencer urges pupils to contemplate nature’s curves while learning his ornate script, soon to be the hand of choice for merchants (including Ford and Coca-Cola) and schools in most states.

1865

Denmark’s Rasmus Malling-Hansen introduces the first commercial typewriter, the Hansen Writing Ball.

Malling-Hansen Society

1880

Alonzo Cross’ patented “stylographic pen” holds its own ink.

1888

Irish immigrant John Robert Gregg invents a shorthand method that will eventually be taught in countless US high schools.

1894

With handwriting under threat by typewriters, Austin Palmer introduces a smaller, faster writing style, taught via militaristic “drills.” His 1912 textbook on the Palmer Method sells more than 1 million copies. (Spen­cerian script is history.)

1904

French psychologist Alfred Binet popularizes handwriting analysis as a window into the writer’s traits. He goes on to invent the IQ test.

1913

Congress greenlights the use of handwriting as forensic evidence in court.

1935

STF/AFP/Getty

The man convicted (and later executed) based on ransom notes for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby laments, “Dat handwriting is the worstest thing against me.”

1944

László József Bíró markets the first ballpoint pen.

1958

The Bic ballpoint hits US stores, turning pens—once luxury goods—into a cheap commodity.

1961

The signature of US Treasurer Elizabeth Rudel Smith on paper currency invites public scorn: Her “t”s are “crossed belatedly, like a feminine afterthought,” snarks a Chicago Tribune writer. The New York Times seizes on the occasion to bemoan the “lost art of handwriting.”

c.1964

From a Louisiana poll test: “Write every other word in this first line and print every third word in same line (original type smaller and first line ended at comma) but capitalize the fifth word that you write.”

1977

A pen makers’ trade group launches National Handwriting Day even as PC makers including Apple and Commodore begin selling the computer keyboards that presage handwriting’s slow, inevitable decline.

1984

The National Council of Teachers of English condemns the practice of making naughty kids write lines, because it “causes students to dislike an activity necessary to their intellectual development and career success.”

Fox

1996

Researchers claim they’ve debunked the “conventional wisdom” that doctors have worse handwriting than other health professionals do.

2000

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles urges “handwriting-challenged” MDs to take a penmanship class, even as a key medical journal blasts handwritten case notes as “a dinosaur long overdue for extinction.”

2001

First-class mail usage hits its peak—only to plummet 40 percent by 2015.

2010

Common Core standards, soon to be adopted by most states, emphasize early typing skills but make no mention of cursive. Parents and educators flip out. “They’re not teaching cursive writing,” conservative TV host Glenn Beck thunders, “because the easiest way to make somebody a slave is dumb them down.”

2012

Scientists find that the brains of preliterate kids respond like a reader’s brain when they write their ABCs, but not when they type or trace the letters; another research team reports that college students who transcribed lectures on their laptops recalled more information than those who took notes by hand.

2014

Bic launches a “Fight For Your Write” campaign—”because writing makes us all awesome!”

2016
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama mandate instruction of handwriting in public schools. Without it, supporters argue, kids wouldn’t be able to sign their names or read the Constitution. Over at Motherboard, Kaleigh Rogers counters that cursive needs to “join its former companion—the quill and inkwell—in the annals of history where it belongs.”

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But If You Don’t Learn Cursive, How Will You Read the Declaration of Independence in the Original?

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